An Embodied Life: Vital Participation
Shared Bodies: Affirming Life, the Vitality of Becoming
A third emphasis of This Spiritual Life is vitalism — an affirmation of nature’s creativity, vitality, and the shared body of life. Spirituality here is not imagined as withdrawal from the world but as becoming more deeply alive, attuning to the pulse of the earth, and embracing the transformations that carry us forward. To live spiritually is to feel oneself as part of a larger field of becoming, where rivers, forests, animals, ancestors, and communities are not separate but interwoven.
Traditions across cultures have long celebrated the vitality of shared bodies. In traditional North American ceremonies, the sweat lodge immerses participants in earth, fire, water, and air as living kin. In Daoism, the circulation of qi expresses the dynamism of the cosmos flowing through each body. In Greek philosophy, Heraclitus declared that life itself is flux, and Spinoza later envisioned an infinite substance (Deus sive Natura) where all beings express the vitality of one living whole. In Amerindian perspectivism, as described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, animals and humans share a common interiority but appear through different bodies, reminding us that life is multinatural rather than mononatural. In Tantrik Hinduism and Buddhism, śakti and prāṇa describe the ever-creative dynamism of consciousness embodied as energy, while in Christian mysticism the Body of Christ appears as a living community of shared flesh and spirit.
Contemporary theory also echoes these older intuitions. New materialism (Jane Bennett, Manuel DeLanda) affirms that matter is never inert but vibrant and self-organizing. New animism (Graham Harvey and others) builds on Indigenous worldviews to describe a cosmos alive with agency, where trees, stones, and rivers are not objects but partners in relation. Both represent a corrective to modernity’s mechanistic “flatland,” challenging the assumption that life can be reduced to dead matter and restoring vitality as a category of thought.
To affirm vitality is also to accept death, decay, and transformation as intrinsic to the same movement of life. Growth and hunger, sexuality and mortality, are not obstacles to transcendence but the very rhythms through which transcendence becomes manifest. Vitalism resists reductionism by reminding us that matter is alive with creativity and relation.
This emphasis on Life as Becoming complements the other dimensions of participatory nondualism. Where Light orients and clarifies, and Love binds and weaves, Life moves and transforms. Together they affirm that spirituality is not an escape from the flux of becoming but a deeper plunge into it — a way of savoring, metabolizing, and co-creating the shared body of the world.